Geezer Butler on Black Sabbath’s Infamous ‘Stonehenge’ Moment
Geezer Butler recalls in his new memoir ‘Into The Void’ how Black Sabbath had a stage set inspired by Stonehenge.
He writes, “Presumably because we had an instrumental called ‘Stonehenge’ on the [‘Born Again’] album, [manager] Don [Arden] wanted a Stonehenge stage set, with a massive sun rising up behind the stones as the show progressed. I thought it was an utterly ridiculous idea.”
The ridiculous idea went to new heights when the set’s builders built the stones too big by misinterpreting the measurements as meters instead of feet.
Of course, the 1984 cult classic ‘This is Spinal Tap’ had a similar Stonehenge bit in the film. However, the film’s actors said those scenes weren’t based on Sabbath’s mistake, which Butler wrote he found “difficult to believe.”